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Recommendations for Scanning Slides

Started Aug 7, 2021 | Discussions thread
Entropy512 Veteran Member • Posts: 6,016
Re: Use HDR

ProfHankD wrote:

paul wassermann wrote:

Thanks! I just solved my problem ( I think). I have a light tablet, have made a painter's tape rectangle just slightly smaller than a 2 x 2 mounted slide. I can just carefully slide the slide in under an edge of the tape. I set up my Sony a9 with 90mm macro lens on a small tripod with the camera carefully positioned square with the slide surface. Two second delay after a shutter press and the image is captured. So far I am really impressed with the detail still preserved in these vintage film images. I am able to clean, load, and photograph a slide in about 30 seconds; the camera does a wonderful job selecting exposure and white balance. So far, so good and have done about 100 slides.

Pretty close to what I was about to suggest (Duplihood ).

However, try putting your A9 into multi-shot auto HDR mode. Slides commonly have about 2 stops of extra DR that is encoded with wildly wrong (too dark) tonality, making it invisible to humans viewing the projected slide, but the huge DR of the auto HDR mode and tone mapping it applies often can pull those shades back into useful scene detail.

Alternatively, just bracket raw and feed the results to hdrmerge - https://github.com/jcelaya/hdrmerge - rather than trust whatever the camera does internally as far as tonemapping.

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